[migrawatch-public] Family of deported Lancaster U.S. citizen man sues

*The Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2007*

Family of deported Lancaster man sues

*Described by kin as developmentally disabled, he was sent to Tijuana
after being arrested for trespassing and has vanished.*

By Sam Quinones
Times Staff Writer

Gone missing
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The family *_of an American citizen_* *who disappeared after apparently
being mistakenly deported to Tijuana a month ago has filed suit asking
the U.S. government to help find him.*

Pedro Guzman, 29, a Lancaster construction worker, is developmentally
disabled and penniless, and he hasn't been heard from since May 11, said
his family at a news conference in Los Angeles on Monday.

*His mother, Maria Carbajal, said she spent the last month in Tijuana
living out of her car while searching in vain for her son. She said
neither the U.S. nor the Mexican government has helped in her search for
him.

"I've done a lot," she said, "and I haven't found him."*

In a statement, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said
they deport a person only "when all available credible evidence suggests
the person is an alien. That process was followed here and ICE has no
reason to believe that it improperly removed Pedro Guzman."

*The family disagrees.

"I feel my government has let me down. I know it has failed him as
well," said younger brother Michael Guzman, 28. "All we want is our
brother back."
*
Guzman was born in Los Angeles, his family said. He is light-skinned and
6 feet 5. He speaks English and Spanish, made it through the 10th grade
and has a driver's license.

But his family said he cannot read or write, gets lost easily and,
although he does not appear mentally impaired, can be taciturn and
suspicious of strangers.

The situation began when Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies arrested
Guzman for trespassing at an airplane junkyard in Lancaster.

*His mother said he was sentenced in April to 120 days in jail, but that
about a month later, he called to say he had been deported to Tijuana
and didn't know why.*

*The American Civil Liberties Union, a partner in the suit, criticized
the Sheriff's Department for acting, it said, as de facto immigration
agents.*

*"Because they did so in this case, there's a man lost in Mexico," said
Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California.*

Steve Whitmore, a Sheriff's Department spokesman, said the department
hadn't reviewed the lawsuit and had no comment on its specifics.

But he denied that deputies act as federal immigration agents. He said
deputies interview foreign-born jail inmates before their release and
turn the information over to the immigration agency.

"ICE makes the decision" on whether a person stays in the country," he
said. "We don't know how that occurs."

Guzman's family said a deputy told them Guzman stated during his booking
that he was born in California. Whether he said anything later that led
deputies to believe he was born abroad is unknown.

"We need to find that out," Whitmore said. "We look forward to telling
the whole story."

Carbajal, a cook at a Jack-in-the-Box in Lancaster, described the last
month as a nightmarish reencounter with the country she left in 1975 as
a girl of 19.

While searching for her son in Tijuana, she lived in her car at a banana
warehouse owned by a man from her village of Jalcocotan, in the Pacific
Coast state of Nayarit. Immigrants from Jalcocotan often use the
warehouse as a way station.

Each day, Carbajal said, she would set out through the city's chaotic
streets, asking people about her son, but returning to the warehouse
alone each night.

She said she left fliers bearing her son's image at the morgue,
hospitals, cantinas, churches and shelters for poor immigrants.

"I've gone places where I know I shouldn't go. I've gone down into the
rivers alone," she said, referring to riverbeds and ravines in Tijuana
where people live and sometimes where bodies are dumped. "No one tells
me anything. They just say, 'I don't know.' "

As tall as he is, Guzman would seem hard to miss. Yet the Mexican
government, which has long criticized the treatment of its immigrants in
the United States, has done nothing to help her, Carbajal said.

She said she went to the jail in Tijuana, asking to tour it in search of
her son.

"They never let me look for him inside the jail, or send his photo in,"
she said. "They just said, 'He's not here.' "

Rosenbaum said the family believes Guzman could be in the jail.

In another case, Rosenbaum said, Tijuana jailers have denied they have a
man in custody, though he continues to call his family from the jail.

"This family cannot do more than it has done," Rosenbaum said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-deport12jun12,1,1785593.story?coll=la-headlines-california

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